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Some wits have remarked that English poets of the twentieth century had plenty to be pessimistic about , not least the truth of Arnold Bennett’s suggestion that in the English-speaking countries the word ‘poetry’ would disperse a crowd quicker than a fire-hose.
Their verses achieved the arduous task of making modern life seem even more dispiriting than it actually is. The patriarch of this tendency was that vindictive old classical
scholar and sometime poet , A.E. Housman (1859-1936). In theme and structure , his stanzas often
resemble the lyrics from some traditional ‘folk’ ballad :
Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows :
What are those blue remembered hills ,
What spires , what farms are those ?
That is the land of lost content ,
I see it shining plain ,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
By the second half of the twentieth century , the baton of disenchanted verse had passed to the balding , bespectacled Philip Larkin (1922-1985). His was an uneventful life. When he was a student at Oxford during the second world war , he helped to host George
Orwell speaking on the topic of Literature and Totalitarianism. The dinner afterwards was at a ‘not-so-good hotel , whereas Dylan Thomas had previously been more expensively entertained. Larkin later observed that ‘It was my first essay in practical criticism.’ After
university he took a sequence of librarian jobs before finishing up in Hull where he grew fat , wrote and drank , became frail and died. No war experience , no marriage ,
no children. His poems are replete with the small dramas and frustrations of the majority of lives but art is about so much more than just the life of its author. Here are
the first and final verses from his uncollected poem Aubade(1) :
I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify....
Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape,
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.
(1) This suggests a dawn or morning love-song. Its also the brand name of a lingerie collection.
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